The Numinosum Blog

The schedule for the 2012 BAMNext Wave Festival was just announced yesterday and this year the Festival will include Numinous! I have been commissioned by the Next Wave Festival to compose an original score to the newly restored silent film, The Loves of Pharaoh by director Ernst Lubitsch. Numinous will perform the score live with the film at the new Steinberg Screen at BAM's Harvey Theater. We are deeply honored to be apart of the one of the preeminent festivals in the country, especially in this its 30th year. This has been in the works for a while now so I'm happy to (finally!) share the news.

There will be an Artist Talk on Friday October 19 after the showing, featuring myself and Thomas Bakels of Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH, who did a wonderful job with the restoration (they also did the digital work on the 2001 and 2010 restorations of Fritz Lang's Metropolis).

Released in 1922, this film was Lubitsch's last silent film in Germany before coming to Hollywood; in fact, this film was a calling card to Hollywood to show he could direct spectacle and "a cast of thousands" as well as D.W. Griffith in his infamous influential The Birth of a Nation (1915). Like that film, as well as later epic films such as Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur (1925) or Cecille B. Demille's The Ten Commandments (1923), The Loves of Pharaoh is grand in scope and ambition and shows a master director's skill even though it was a few years away from the famous musicals and comedies that cemented him and his "Lubitsch touch" in the pantheon of great Hollywood "Golden Age" directors from the 1930s and 1940s.

(photo credits: top photo, scene from The Loves of Pharaoh from Alpha-Omega; bottom photo, German poster from IMDb)